Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism

The 1992 presidential election campaign showed just how deep were the divisions within the Republican party. In this provocative collection of essays, Washington Times columnist Samuel Francis argues that the victory of the Democratic party marks not only the end of the Reagan-Bush era but the failure of American conservatism. Francis cites a number of reasons for the failure. After contributing to Ronald Reagan's landslide victory in 1981, leaders of the New Right divorced themselves from popular discontents and pursued democratic globalism, a policy inconsistent with the theories of the Old Right. The success of the "managerial revolution" - the shift of power from the bourgeois elite to a managerial or corporate elite - spawned a new kind of conservative, the neoconservative. Francis shows that by the end of the Reagan administration, neoconservatism was the dominant faction of the American Right. While the Old Right had sought smaller government, the Reagan and Bush administrations contributed to one of the largest expansions of the federal government in history. While the Old Right promoted cultural conservatism, "multiculturalism" and "political correctness" had become powerful forces by the beginning of the 1990s. Viewing the intellectual, political, and social changes in the American conservative movement, Francis discusses such individuals as George Will, Joseph McCarthy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Whittaker Chambers. He also reflects on the meaning of such ideas as equality and democracy, and the role of elites in American society and culture. The changes of the last decade have led to a virtual disappearance of the political Right. Beautiful Losers is a timely look at acrucial moment in the history of American conservatism, when, for the first time since the New Deal, the nation faces the prospect of political democracy without an oppositional force to liberalism.